


Rise and Fall and Light from Dying Embers

by MonPetitParselmouth



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Pain, Poor Alexander Hamilton, Recovered Memories, Reincarnation, different types of quiet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-05 10:02:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14041827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MonPetitParselmouth/pseuds/MonPetitParselmouth
Summary: Alexander Hamilton is reincarnated. John Laurens and Eliza Schuyler aren't.Now, all he has is the quiet, and memories he never wanted.





	Rise and Fall and Light from Dying Embers

**Author's Note:**

> This wrote itself.

Alexander doesn’t remember when things start to feel off. Every morning, school. Every afternoon, work. Every evening, homework. A monotonous pattern, pounding a rhythm throughout his existence. He's never noticed anything peculiar about it, but these days it’s as if he’s always a second behind, or perhaps a second late. 

There is no melody to his beat. 

But nothing happens until the eleventh of July. 

All day, he’s been having an insistent headache. It tugs at the back of his mind as he types away at his essay feverishly in English, and it makes him snap irritably at a random freshman in the hallway after lunch break, which he immediately regrets. 

There’s a pounding, sharp feeling behind his eyelids, which he closes after a moment. A light breeze stirs tentatively outside, then slowly creeps in through the open window and ruffles his dark auburn hair. He doesn't mind; he’s lost in thought. 

Alexander gets like this sometimes. He’ll sink hesitantly, softly into the intricate tangles of chaos that are his thoughts, and he finds that it soothes him to slowly unravel them, analyze them one by one, instead of letting them dart around in his mind. This is what he muses over as he leans against the wall, thinking. 

He’s snapped from his train of thought, however, by another white-hot pang in the back of his head. Rubbing it, Alexander gathers both his thoughts and his textbooks, registers his irritation and quickly banks it, then strides off.

The rest of the day inches by, from the end of the school day to the time when the star-spangled night sky glows faintly with the reflection of dim street lights of his city.  

 _His_ city? Alexander shakes his head and rolls over. 

 _The_ city. Right?

Sleep comes to him fairly quickly, but it’s anything but peaceful. 

One could call it nightmares. Flashes and colorful blurs of scenes he could hardly even imagine happening to him. 

 

**_I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory_ **

 

He remembers eyes, and words. 

Violet-blue and shimmering, mirroring his own— _but my eyes are brown,_ Alexander thinks—the last traces of life leaving them, all energy sapped away. 

 _I love you. You know that, mijo, right?_ she says, raspy. 

Gorgeous obsidian, brimful of rage that isn’t directed at Alexander. They’re flooded with a passion Alex isn’t used to seeing on a face that isn’t his. 

 _You’re the closest friend I’ve got,_ he says, sincere. 

Cat’s-eye green, with undertones of smoky grey, like sinking into twin whirlpools of inviting emerald. 

 _This one’s mine, sir,_ she says, seductive. 

Glacier-blue, glinting with malice—maybe even loathing?—and something darker underneath, something tinged with envy and indignation.

 _You’re nothing without Washington behind you_ , he says, vindictive. 

Pale, glittering brown, far lighter and full of more youthful innocence than the violet, but with the same glossy hollowness, trying to widen and narrow at the same time. 

 _I was aiming for the sky,_ he says, heartfelt. 

Chestnut, mingled compassion and dejectedness glistening in every amber highlight. 

 _It’s quiet uptown,_ she says, sorrowful.

Black, black like the sky when midnight’s chimes have long since sounded, and nary a beam of moonlight to bounce off the golden stars. They’re shielded, like whoever they belong to doesn’t want anyone to know that they’re hurting inside. 

 _W A I T!_ he says, desperate, shrieking. 

 

**_When’s it gonna get me? In my sleep, seven feet ahead of me?_ **

 

He remembers pain, and death.

Terrible, deep-seated pain—a death, a separation, a bullet between his ribs, flames ripping through his veins. 

Gazing off into the horizon, standing alone on the bow of a ship, the loss of the only place he’d ever call home fresh in his mind. The quiet pounding in his head, pounding like a drumbeat, because quiet isn’t silence, never will be.

His fingers shaking, salty tears blurring at his eyes, blurring the careful ink script on the letter. _Tuesday the twenty-seventh._ The quiet like a cold embrace, Eliza’s hand warm on his shoulder in contrast. 

Striding through the streets, fingers dragging through his now grey-streaked hair.  The quiet pressing in all around him, strangely comforting, numbing the hollow emptiness where his son used to be.

Unmoving on the dueling ground as the bullet seems to slow, then quicken, and it hits like a torpedo, Burr’s yell echoing through his head. The quiet dazing him, buzzing in his scalp, tugging at his senses, even as he goes limp. 

 

**_If I see it coming do I run or do I let it be?_ **

 

He remembers people, and names. 

Eliza. His Betsey. He misses awaking to her sweet perfumed scent in the mornings, misses the way her soft hair would catch the morning light and the way she would patiently listen to his rants about Jefferson without complaint. Even after all he’s done to her, even after Maria, she was willing to listen. 

Lafayette and Hercules. He misses their jokes and casual banter, the way they could exchange secret messages with mere nods or winks. 

Angelica and Peggy. He was often Peggy’s confidant, and finds himself missing her entertaining stories because _Oh, just one more, Alexander,_ and he would oblige and listen. He misses Angelica’s unmatchable wits, their communication—dare he say flirting— through placement of commas, discussing politics and comparing his life to Shakespeare plays.  

President Washington. He misses his fatherly tone and wisdom, and, even if he will never admit it, the way he used to call him _son._

Philip. His precious son, torn from him in such a crude and morbid manner, far too early. He misses all of his children, but Philip had been taken from Alexander, not the other way around as with Angie, John, Alexander Jr, and the rest. 

Hell, he even misses Jefferson and Madison. 

But there’s one person whose absence makes him feel as if a piece of his heart  is hollow and empty, a person whose name rolls smoothly off his tongue and reverberates in his mind, a comforting lifeline in the hurricane Alexander calls his existence. 

_John Laurens._

He misses the way John’s freckles would glow silver in moonlight, as if they were stardust sprinkled across his cheeks. He misses how John used to smile, so hesitantly, and yet it would light up the whole room. He misses the warm, liquid-gold feeling that would flood his chest whenever John entered their tent, brushing off dust and shaking off specks of blood, straightening his navy-blue military uniform, and then they would meet eyes and Alexander’s heart would skip a beat. He misses those sparkling black eyes that he would meet, too young to go dull when they did, because John had left the world at twenty-seven. 

Left _Alex_. 

His world will never be the same.

 

**_Is it like a beat without a melody?_ **

 

Alexander jolts from his restless sleep, heart drumming frantically in his chest like a caged bird clattering against its bars. He stares into nothingness as the last little memories click into place like the final pieces of a puzzle.

His eyelids slide close in pure exhaustion. Forty-nine years and ten days’ worth of memories have shoved their way into his head, and he doesn’t know whether or not he’s gone insane.

A last vision fluttered quizzically through his head and gently inserts itself into his mind, probing carefully at his memories. Adrenaline shoots through Alexander’s blood as the words ring through his head. 

 _Tomorrow there’ll be more of us,_ John says. 

Alex Harrison closes his eyes again to the raging, suffocating darkness choking him.

For the first time in more than two hundred years, Alexander Hamilton opens them, and feels that awful, burning pain again, like fire raging through his veins. 

The quiet, the quiet of heart-wrenching loss, the quiet in the eye of a hurricane, is there again, and it whips around him, silently tearing him apart. It doesn’t pound, nor embrace, nor numb, not even buzz. Not this time. It’s just there. 

All Alexander can think about are eyes, chestnut eyes and obsidian eyes.

_If I throw away my shot, is this how you’ll remember me?_

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sorry.


End file.
